I found out what happens when you let a boiling pan run out of sap....

and its NOT GOOD!!!

I play mens indoor football, and I had a game last night at 8:00. I filled my pan with about 6-7 gallons of sap and asked my wife to check in on it and add more sap if it needed it until I got home while it boiled out in the drive way. I have no idea how it went through that much sap while I was gone less than 2 hours...but she calls me in a panic saying something is smoking really bad outside so I told her to go out and turn off the propane tank and Id be home in a few minutes. I got home to find the picture you see. Somehow it burnt through all of the sap and then melted the aluminum pan. The only thing I can think of is a hole must of formed in the pan and it dripped out all the sap and then the burner just did its thing to the empty aluminum pan. It literally had melted metal inside my propane burner. Luckily no real damage, no fires, and the propane burner even has no damage as the melted aluminum just came right off once it cooled. I will now no longer EVER leave a pan boiling while im not home. So im out my biggest pan and about 10 gallons of boiled down concentrate lol, that of course makes me more upset than losing the pan!Attachment 7536

That's quite a story! Thank goodness your pot was the only casualty. You might need to consider changing your user name to SmellsLikeBurningNH. ;) I hope you can find yourself a new pot quickly and get back in the game. There is too much sap flowing these days to have your production line hampered.

Thanks Karen!!!

I have 4 pots....just for some reason i dont understand why this one went dry on me? The others all had about a gallon or 2 of liquid in them still when this happened. I can only guess that is sprung a leak and drained out then the rest is what you see. Ive got 60 gallons of sap to boil right now, so I will be back at it tonight and NOT leaving the house.

Wow! I had no idea that a pan could melt like that, especially that fast. I have been doing the same thing after work trying to concentrate my sap down some before I put it on the evaporator, going to be paying much more attention after seeing this.

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Originally Posted by Bucksaw

Wow! I had no idea that a pan could melt like that, especially that fast. I have been doing the same thing after work trying to concentrate my sap down some before I put it on the evaporator, going to be paying much more attention after seeing this.

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Me either!!! If you could see the bottom of my propane burner, the metal looked like melted solder or melted candle wax, it literally melted the metal so that it pooled and dripped.

Yeah it would certainly seem that it leaked to be that dry that fast. I bet your wife feels really badly about what happened. She was probably pretty scared when she saw the meltdown in progress with propane gas tanks all around.

She was worried and im just glad none of the melting metal hit a propane hose or anything like that to cause a real fire or explosion. So I wanted to just put this out there, because I certianly never knew this could happen.

And for that, we have all learned something very important this morning.

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Originally Posted by Run Forest Run!

And for that, we have all learned something very important this morning.

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you sure you havent been talking to my wife? :-)

Yikes! You sure were lucky that you didn't have a bigger emergency on your hands! Your pic gives a whole new meaning to 'burnt pan'! Glad this ended on a safe note, but sorry for your loss of sap!

I did exactly the same thing about 12 years ago when I started boiling on a turkey frier I went inside to watch some basketball 20 mins later asked my son to add syrup and he came right back in telling me of the big hole in bottom of the pan. If pan froths up and no one is there to turn down the gas you would do that in a very short period of time.